Dilandu, there's a provable link between (for example) people posting what Eric Flint calls "masturbatory fantasies about violence" on men's rights forums and people radicalizing themselves there to such an extent that they commit murders. Flint is right to point out that, taken individually, these incidents are less destructive (and certainly less effective) than the incidents of politically motivated violence he himself was present for and remembers, but that doesn't change the issue that Sanford was talking about.
The problem here is that he (and, for that matter you) is seemingly unaware of a phenomenon called
stochastic terrorism. We've seen communities with a relatively insular outlook (like some of the Baen's Bar subfora) self-radicalize and act as an incubator for people going deep into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory and paranoia, some of whom may even lash out and storm a pizza place to free the children they're sure are held there for Democrats to rape (to choose a random example).
Is this as big a problem as, say, an organized militia with relatively good organization and communication deciding to wage war on the state for allowing black people to vote would be? No. But it encourages an environment conducive to random acts of violence; it is terrorism in the purest sense as it raises the threat of violence by a lot.
Flint tries to minimize this: He points out, correctly I might add, that the posts Sanford presents are not representative of the vast majority of posts on the Bar, and that the users pointed out as problems are only a tiny minority compared to the bar's active (as opposed to registered) population. But that's not the point here: Yes, all of that is true, but the accusation isn't "Baen's Bar is full of white supremacists daydreaming about a civil war" - it's "white supremacists are daydreaming about a civil war on the bar
and this is tolerated by the staff", which due to the factors pointed out above, is an issue that Baen should address.
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Speaking of what Flint wrote, while his take is certainly better than RFCs and actively engages with Sanford's post, it is still fatally flawed.
He defends Baen against the accusation of being a "conservative" publisher by pointing out that he is Baen's most singularly prolific writer - but that doesn't change the fact that Baen's lineup
does include people from the far right end of the spectrum as well, and that Baen's
public reputation is that of a conservative publisher that will absolutely publish books in which every evil in the world can be traced back to someone being too liberal. This is a topic Flint spends consiuderable amount of writing on, as he sees it from the insider's perspective of knowing Jim Baen and Toni Weisskopf personally and having a good idea of what their intentions and priorities are in curating the Baen brand, and he rates the suggestion that Baen has a reputation for conservative opinions as personally insulting both to him, Jim Baen, Toni Weisskopf and other lefty writers who publish with Baen.
He accuses Sanford of cherry-picking, of taking things out of context - And it's true, Sanford does do that,
from a certain point of view. If you have a forum with millions of posts made by thousands of people over decades, a sudden influx of a few dozen posters who post vile shit in a short period of time doesn't register as anything but a drop in the ocean if we take the output of the bar in its entirety. But that's talking past the actual problem Sanford is talking about: The issue he raises is that Baen's Bar, as an outgrowth of Baen the publishing house, doesn't have policies in place to set moderation standards that would set effective limits on what is and isn't accepted discourse, which can be seen by there being no official response to people daydreaming about a civil war even after a bunch of these daydreamers got together to
actually storm the capitol to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Flint further points out that he doesn't see the problem because he stopped reading or participating in political discussions on the Bar decades ago, because it was all too stupid for him, and that he doesn't tolerate these discussions in the subfora he is directly responsible for. Good on him! Unfortunately for his post, this also makes it completely irrelevant. If I don't deal drugs, and do not allow drugs to be dealt in any establishment I own, does that then mean that I can firmly state that my city doesn't have a drug problem? No, of course not.
This is what I meant earlier by survivorship bias: Flint doesn't see a problem because he found a way to compartmentalize the stupid away and doesn't consider it to be his problem, and is now incensed that someone dares point out that a problem might exist.
Flint finishes his essay with the words
I will now say the same thing to Jason Sanford and anyone who takes his essay seriously. “If you really can’t tell the difference between a genuine threat of violence and some blowhards jacking off on a science fiction web site, you need to take a remedial course in common sense.”
I can absolutely tell the difference between a direct threat of imminent violence and people posting on a message board.
However: We live in an environment where "people posting on a message board" were creating an elaborate conspiracy theory from whole cloth where pizza parlors were secretly sites where kidnapped children were trafficked to the rich and powerful that at least one person took seriously enough to hold the employees of a pizza place at gunpoint. The risk that something like this happens is low, granted; it takes a lot of stuff to make things go that wrong. But if you're a community moderator, you have to ask yourself this: Knowing that the risk of someone daydreaming so hard that they shove their guns in people's faces exists, can you justify letting people do that without occasionally pumping the brakes or pouring some water over a discussion that goes beyond the boundaries of rhetorical hyperbole?
